Add 'Bot' flag to account

In Mastodon, we can add a 'bot' flag to tell people that the account is controlled by an algorithm.

In pleroma, this flag is always on False.

Is there a way to change that?

changed the description

Please wait until !2005 (merged) & pleroma-fe!1011 (closed) are accepted.

Why do we need a bot flag?
What problem does it solve?

I guess it maximizes compatibility with Mastodon but I just don't see the point. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It improves the coverage of the ActivityPub standard and the interoperability between Mastodon. This feature also sometimes brings additional information about the account.

@xx The "Bot" flag is useful to warn people that the account toots using an algorithm.

So:

• people can choose to follow humans only and not bots
• bots could toot unexpected content sometimes

People are not surprised if the account doesn't post what they expected when they subscribed (start followed)

actor type is configurable now.

closed

reopened

Reopening this because of pleroma-fe#832 (closed)

Do we really want users to control their own actor_type? What happens if a user sets their actor_type to Application? We already have one assumption that if you're not Person or Service that we shouldn't try to update follower/following counts for that user.

I'm thinking a better proposal would be if a user sets their account to bot we then report actor_type as Service, but not let them change their actor_type to any arbitrary value.

Is there anything I'm overlooking here?

You are right, we should restrict this to only Service and Person, for normal users at least. I'll do that tomorrow.

How do we want to control this from the Admin API side? Should we allow AdminFE to set arbitrary actor_type and also enable/disable bot flag on accounts? Or should actor_type and bot flag always be linked?

I think for now we should just restrict to Service and Person, the other ones seem like footguns at the moment, there's no real use for them but it might break things in the future

assigned to @ssuprunenko

Ok, after speaking with Lain here are the action items:

• Allow users to set bot field via /api/v1/accounts/update_credentials
• Allow users to set actor_type field via /api/v1/accounts/update_credentials. This is a Pleroma-specific API extension.
  • The only values we allow the user to set here are Service and Person. Any other values should be discarded / throw an error.
• If actor_type field on a user is set to Service, we must always return bot field as true.

mentioned in issue #1600 (closed)

mentioned in merge request !2662 (merged)

mentioned in commit 31761340

closed via merge request !2662 (merged)